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Behind the Scenes with Camera and Lens Testing Service DxO Labs

Stephen Shankland over at CNET has written an interesting behind-the-scenes look at how DxO Labs &#8212; one of the world&#8217;s premier camera testing services &#8212; evaluates equipment. DxO Labs is based near Paris, France and was the result of a 2003 spinoff from a company called Vision IQ, which specialized in swimming pool safety. Since then, the group has published over 185 in-depth camera reviews on its website DxOMark.

After years of testing cameras, they&#8217;ve come to a few interesting (and surprising conclusions):

Actually, megapixels do matter

&#8220;Everybody says there is no need for more pixels, and we should reduce the number to a reasonable number so the quality will improve,&#8221; Guichard said. However, DxO&#8217;s aggregate measurements tell a different story: &#8220;If we look at the cameras, there are more and more pixels, and the quality is increasing in the meantime.&#8221;

ISO isn&#8217;t what it appears to be

[...] just because this year&#8217;s camera goes to a higher ISO than an earlier model, don&#8217;t assume that the image quality at the highest ISO setting is on par. Cameras can clean up photos as they&#8217;re converted into JPEGs, but DxO&#8217;s measurements of the raw image data shows how newer cameras produce more noise at the highest ISO before that processing.

Phone cameras are better than you think

&#8220;If you scale down the quality to the sensor size, today the [phone] cameras and sensors are better than the SLR sensors,&#8221; Guichard said. &#8220;In the end, the image quality is not as good because it&#8217;s smaller. But if Canon were able to put the technical quality of a 2012 phone camera on full-frame sensor, they would win about 1 stop more [in image quality]. It&#8217;s a big difference.&#8221;

In practice, sensors beat film&#8217;s dynamic range

Most people aren&#8217;t surprised to hear that high-end digital cameras offer higher resolution, lower noise, and better low-light performance than film. But there&#8217;s a common belief that film still surpasses digital when it comes to another important attribute, dynamic range, which measures the spread from where a scene is too bright for a camera to capture detail to where it&#8217;s so dark that details are lost in the image noise. [...] &#8220;All digital SLR cameras are above film,&#8221; Guichard said.

Head on over to CNET for the entire article &#8212; it&#8217;s worth a read.